Hollywoodland

I can’t talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it’s a horror to look back on. I can’t imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn’t even refer to the place by name. ‘Out there’ I called it.”
Dorothy Parker“Hollywood is a place that attracts people with massive holes in their souls.”Julia Phillips, author of ‘You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again’ “I can no longer continue to work with 15th Century Fox”.Jean Renoir, on dealing with the stupidity, reactionary philistinism and nepotist greed of Hollywood, when trying to make films there.

Once upon a time Indian lands were stolen and re-named ‘Hollywood’

Though for ten thousand years this particular stretch of soil

Had been the territory of the Chumash tribe, an American First Nation

Who knew the land by their own name, Kii-Tovar, or ‘homeland’.

After death-dealing land-grabs by colonists lasting four centuries

There were just a thousand Chumash in Kii-Tovar in 1900,

When all were evicted by force and their land squared off in lots,

With a promotional sign erected; it read ‘Hollywoodland’.

The developers’ advertisement had fifty-foot high capital letters,

Illuminated so they could be seen from miles around.

The developers aimed to sell the land for twenty times more

Than they’d borrowed, to exploit their high-handed theft.

With each of the lots on offer described as an “upscale location”

And the remaining Chumash chased off for lowering the tone,

More entrepreneurs were attracted, finding landscape and climate

Conducive to tale-telling and creating cultural myths.

The citrus fruit now grown on the Chumash’s former territory

Would taste bitter to Kii-Tovar’s hunter-gatherer tribe.

The ancestral visions of Chumash shamen were now replaced

By the black-and-white flicker of a mechanical lantern.

Thomas Edison had made “an instrument which does for the eye

“What the phonograph does for the ear”

Designed, in Edison’s words, for “the recording and reproduction

Of things in motion…” and he’d patented it.

But to save their having to pay royalties on Edison’s patents,

On his machinery and on his film stock,

The new cowboys of celluloid surreptitiously moved to the west

To be just out of reach of Edison’s lawyers.

In 1914 the first feature to be filmed in Hollywoodland

(Soon abbreviated to being simply ‘Hollywood’)

Was called ‘The Squaw Man’, then renamed ‘The White Man’.

It would anticipate the stories Hollywood liked to tell.

In this melodrama a man comes to the US fleeing a murder charge.

Saved by an Indian girl called Red Wing, he proposes marriage.

Later, in the clear, he deserts her on his coming into an inheritance,

Cruelly indicating that she’s unworthy to be a white man’s bride.

The moral being that a man may use his fellow man with impunity,

Once he adopts misguided notions of his own superiority –

As such views were acceptable to the US Empire’s ‘intelligentsia’

They were uncritically absorbed by the Hollywood mindset.

To Mark Twain, the author of Huckleberry Finn, the Native American

Was “ignoble—base and treacherous, and hateful”

“His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery,

“And of low and devilish instincts.”

In Tom Sawyer, Injun Joe acts out of more than just an evil nature—

“He is evil”, Twain declares, because of his “Indian blood,”

Likewise, after the Battle of Wounded Knee – a prototype for future US genocide –

L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, chillingly declares

That he advocated the total extermination of the Lakota people

Since “the Whites”, he writes in the Dakota Pioneer,

“Are masters of the American continent as they rule by law of conquest,

And by justice of civilization” the author thunders.

The “best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured

By the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians”

Then in The Wizard of Oz Baum set down such thoughts in stone,

The ‘Awgwas’ being his hated Indians thinly disguised,

“You are a transient race,” accused Baum, “passing from life into nothingness.

“We, who live forever, pity but despise you” and he’d rejoice in their demise:

“All that remained of the wicked Awgwas was a great number of earthen hillocks dotting the plain” –

One Response to Hollywoodland

Hello there, just changed into aware of your blog through Google, and found that it’s truly informative. I am gonna watch out for brussels. I’ll be grateful in the event you proceed this in future. Many other people might be benefited out of your writing. Cheers!